Acting

Thursday

Roger Lewis

The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

From our UK edition

When you think that David Niven, James Mason, Ronnie Barker, Arthur Lowe and Powell and Pressburger among many others failed to receive state honours, you’ll concede that a knighthood was wasted on Patrick Stewart, even if for 12 years he was chancellor of Huddersfield University. I mean no disparagement by this. I’m happy for him. But why not Sir Timothy Spall or Sir Timothy West? Stewart, whose grandmother was Stan Laurel’s babysitter, is a middle-ranking mime with a gurgling bass-baritone. He is chiefly famous for the X-Men franchise and for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plus the numerous feature film spin-offs in which he commanded an interplanetary spacecraft.

David Hare

Just how much lower can the Conservatives sink?

From our UK edition

This is the year in which Michael Gambon died, so by definition a grim one for theatre. Of all the tributes, one of the most acute was by Tom Hollander, who recalled how expressive Gambon’s voice was after 30 years on stage. He could reach hundreds of people while seeming to address only one or two. That’s essential theatre acting. When Gambon turned to cinema, his voice had become supple and mellow. It set me to thinking of other great cinema voices. Simone Signoret came first to mind. Then Jeanne Moreau, James Mason, and above all, Henry Fonda. These actors have you at hello. I would have added Marlene Dietrich, but if you can be so easily parodied, can you be truly great? A Los Angeles record producer tells me that teenagers no longer consider actors as role models.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Kenneth Branagh: the luckiest man in Hollywood?

If the average person were to be asked what Sir Kenneth Branagh had won an Oscar for, the vast majority would probably say “acting.” Then when told that, despite two Academy Award nominations, he has not been so rewarded, they might then assume that it’s his direction of such films as Henry V, Hamlet or Belfast that led him to take him gold. In fact, though, it’s his screenplay for the latter film that finally won him an Oscar in 2022, showing that Branagh is a true renaissance man; it is not for nothing that first theater company he founded was called the Renaissance. This summer has been, as usual, a busy and productive one for the actor-writer-director.

Tuesday

Alex Clark

A cherry orchard, three sisters and a summer romance: Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett, reviewed

From our UK edition

Two plays guide the reader through Tom Lake, Ann Patchett’s ninth novel: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the story of ordinary lives in a small New Hampshire community in the early years of the 20th century, which, with its radically stripped-back staging, sets time and place in the context of all time and place, and enjoins its audience to ponder what is truly valuable in human life; and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the story of the battle for an estate that throbs with conflict, violence and, ultimately, destruction. Patchett’s mind is on the twin forces of preservation and entropy: our desperate attempts to cling to the local and the familiar as the wider world threatens and besieges us; our need to both depart and return, to embrace and exclude.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Noël Coward, the English playwright who loved all things American

Half a century after his death, the playwright, songwriter, actor, director and general Renaissance man Noël Coward is regarded, with some justification, as the quintessential English polymath. His best-known plays and songs, from Private Lives and Present Laughter to “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and “London Pride,” seem so steeped in their Britishness — even if Coward was catering to a country that loved seeing a distorted, exaggerated version of itself — they could be placed in a time capsule as perfectly executed microcosms of the national identity. Any man who could write “Wouldn’t it be dreadful to live in a country where they didn’t have tea?

coward

Monday

Dominic Dromgoole

In defence of Shakespeare’s Globe

From our UK edition

Off to my old manor, the Globe theatre, to join a celebratory gathering of thems and theys for I, Joan, a non-binary telling of the Joan of Arc story. The show has caused no shortage of outrage in various communities on the left, centre and right, and has had the Globe labelled as misogynist by feminists of a certain generation. It is a great compliment to the Globe that even though it only opened in 1997, it is already held so dear that whatever happens there is quickly amplified into a broader debate. In my time as artistic director, we had one Sun front page ridiculing our engagement with foreigners; then later a concerted pile-on from left and right when we had the temerity to invite both Israelis and Palestinians to an international festival.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Angela Lansbury was so much more than Murder, She Wrote

The only time I ever saw Angela Lansbury on stage was in 2014 in London, when she played the half-baked medium Madame Arcati in a revival of Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit. Although it was rumored that the then-88-year-old Lansbury was having her lines fed to her via earpieces, it did not affect her comic timing one iota. It is no exaggeration to say that Lansbury took a character who has passed into over-familiarity via decades of revivals and made her fresh and hilarious once again. For anyone to achieve this is remarkable, but to do so at an age when most actors would have long since retired is little short of phenomenal. Lansbury’s death at the age of 96 — a few days shy of her 97th birthday — has some uncanny parallels with the recent passing of the Queen.

Friday

Patrick West

Michael Palin isn’t a ‘national treasure’

From our UK edition

It's a well-known fact that Michael Palin is a 'national treasure'. Or so you are told just about every single time the travel presenter and writer appears on television or features in a newspaper interview. So it was with grim inevitably that a few days before the first instalment of his latest expedition, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, aired on Channel 5 on Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times both felt it imperative to describe him with this phrase. Never mind that he's no doubt utterly sick of this lazy cliché – objectively, it's a misleading misnomer.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

In praise of character actors

From our UK edition

The star system is a false hierarchy: the best rarely make it to the top. I thought of this recently when it was announced that David Warner had died. Few outside acting could name him, though you may have seen his head flying off in The Omen, a film in which heads are cheap. Warner was a Manchester-born jobbing actor: a character actor, better defined by what he is not, which was a star. I could write pages about why a star is a star, and a character actor remains a character actor, but the most significant reason is simple. Warner was brilliant but he was not handsome.

Thursday

Simon Callow

An actor’s recipe for insanity

From our UK edition

I’m on the road, a very proper place for an actor to be. Never mind all those jokes about some people having tours de force and others being forced to tour – a tour gets the stuff out to the people. If they can’t come to us, we must go to them, each actor on his ass, as Hamlet smuttily tells Polonius. I fancy that my generation of actors was the last to assume that we would take our wares around the country. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed discovering all the different playhouses, with their different challenges and opportunities – a chance to rethink the thing. Standing in the same place, on the same West End stage night after night, peering out into the same auditorium, is a recipe for insanity or at the very least automatism.

Thursday

Bart van Es

Jonathan Bate weaves a memoir around madness in English literature

From our UK edition

There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s Free Woman, in which the author blends a memoir of her marriage break-up with a close reading of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and Sally Bayley’s Girl With Dove, which fuses an account of a traumatic childhood with sketches that focus on Bayley’s early love of books. Addressed to a wider readership, these works combine autobiography with literary criticism. They are carefully crafted, confessional and ask why literature matters.

Thursday

Peter Jones

Could today’s Hollywood stars have made it in ancient Greece?

From our UK edition

The Oscar frenzy spent, it is worth reflecting on how easy writers and actors have it these days. The ancient Greeks invented our idea of acted drama, and the conventions were tough. Here are the main ones. In myth-based tragedies, for example, all the speaking parts – young and old, male and female – were played, and occasionally sung too, by only three fully masked male actors (one play had 11 speaking parts – work that out!). There was also a ‘chorus’ – 12 or 15 actors, all masked, singing and dancing in unison between episodes, though the leader could converse with the main characters. Of low social status, they provided an alternative collective voice to that of their ‘heroic’ superiors.

Thursday

Lee Langley

Lasting infamy: Booth, by Karen Joy Fowler, reviewed

From our UK edition

Were it not for an event on the night of 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth would be remembered, if at all, as an actor; brother of the more famous Edwin, and son of Junius Brutus – a footnote to the history of American theatre. But that night Booth leaped on to the stage of Ford’s theatre, Washington D.C., shouting ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ before fleeing. He had just shot Abraham Lincoln. Five days earlier the Civil War had officially ended. Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, feared Lincoln would overthrow the constitution – he was already promising votes to freed slaves. The assassination was Booth’s way to ‘avenge the South’.

Thursday

Maureen Lipman

My thoughts on Helen Mirren’s casting

From our UK edition

On Monday, I had a whinge-walk with Lizzie, my friend of 47 years. We met at breathing classes for our first babies and we gave birth on the same day in the now defunct Avenue Clinic in St John’s Wood. Our children grew up joined at the hip. Today my daughter Amy is a playwright in NW3 and Lizzie’s is a Buddhist monk in Nepal. Amy is with me at least twice a week, though her mother’s ability to make off-the-cuff remarks which generate front-page headlines makes her wish she was the one in a Nepalese monastery. I faced my daughter’s embarrassment and near cultural cancellation last week after I commented on the casting of Helen Mirren as Golda Meir. The papers rather gleefully framed it along the lines of ‘Lipman objects to Dame Helen playing Golda!’.

Thursday

Simon Ings

All successful spies need to be good actors

From our UK edition

On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard Moore tweeted (tweeted!): ‘#Bond or #Smiley need not apply. They’re (splendid) fiction but actually we’re #secretlyjustlikeyou.’ The gesture’s novelty disguised, at the time, its appalling real-world implications. Bond was, after all, competent and Smiley had integrity. Stars and Spies, by the veteran intelligence historian Christopher Andrew and the theatre director and circus producer Julius Green, is a thoroughly entertaining read, but not at all a reassuring one.

Thursday

Robert Jackman

‘You should see some of the other scripts that come through’: Robert Carlyle interviewed

From our UK edition

‘I always feel slightly sick when I hear actors talking politics,’ says Robert Carlyle — that polished Glaswegian burr sounding no less arresting over a slightly patchy Zoom connection. ‘I mean we’re all entitled to an opinion,’ he continues, sounding for a second as though he might be about to opt for a more diplomatic track. ‘I just find that too many actors find it difficult to get theirs across without sounding like a twat.’ It’s a fair point, you might think. But for Carlyle, it’s also been a good professional move. Reflecting on his career, he credits this aversion to mouthing off with inspiring his long-term commitment to keeping his head down.

Wednesday

Rosie Millard

No success like failure

It is a standard narrative in all showbiz reporting — and one that arts hacks seem to be duty bound to abide by. It is the fairy tale of ‘Making It’: the story of a star whose career took time to get off the ground but, thanks to perseverance and self-belief, went stratospheric. It goes like this: ‘I was a nobody, and I was turned down from everything. And I nearly didn’t go to that final audition, but whaddya know? I turned up and... Shazam! Oscars raining down and a mini-series on Netflix.’ There is an encyclopedia of stars who toughed it out before making it big.

failure

Tuesday

Tom Slater

Why should we care whether an actor is gay?

From our UK edition

In this woke age, we seem to have incredibly short memories. We feel the need to damn people today for holding views that were completely acceptable yesterday. But the memory of Russell T. Davies, the acclaimed British screenwriter, seems to be particularly short. In an interview for the Radio Times — promoting his new Channel 4 series, It’s A Sin, about young gay men in 1980s London — Davies has criticised the practice of giving gay roles to straight actors. ‘I’m not being woke about this’, he said. ‘It’s about authenticity, the taste of 2020. You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them in a wheelchair, you wouldn’t black someone up.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Fascinatingly weird – but not satisfyingly weird: Herzog’s Family Romance LLC reviewed

From our UK edition

In the past Werner Herzog has given us a man pushing a ship up a mountain, a 16th-century conquistador going mad in Peru, Timothy Treadwell being eaten by a bear (who isn’t still recovering from that one?) and the 3-D documentary on cave paintings that ended with albino alligators, so there is never any saying what his next film will be about. Only that it’s likely to be quite weird. And Family Romance is quite weird. It’s real but fake (or vice versa) and filmed on the fly in the Japanese language even though Herzog doesn’t speak Japanese. And there’s more, so much more. It’s fascinatingly weird for sure. Even if, ultimately, it’s not satisfyingly weird. It’s fascinatingly weird for sure.

Friday

Lloyd Evans

What are the new rules on race and performance?

From our UK edition

What are the new rules on race and performance? In the world of TV, everyone is busy apologising, self-censoring and denouncing their previous work. Ant and Dec have deleted routines in which they imitated Japanese girls and people of colour. The comedian Leigh Francis has expressed contrition for satirising Craig David in Bo' Selecta! (which was nominated for a Best Comedy Bafta in 2004). Matt Lucas and David Walliams have withdrawn sketches featuring dark-skinned characters. A new order is being created. A new hierarchy of privileges and prohibitions based on ethnicity is taking root. We are strengthening the vice we sought to eliminate. The new rule appears to forbid actors from playing characters whose racial origins they don’t share. Or does it?